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Godspeed you black maestro

He decided on the direct approach and made a film inspired by his blob of desert-spent jism and visualized a parable of a modern black fugitive/runaway slave told in the raw, liberating language of a poet-warrior. (Chairman Ho Chi Nigger, aka Darius James)

Birthdays and anniversaries are usually rather self-congratulatory affairs, opportunities for a reassuring dose of back-patting platitudes and anecdotage. But that is not likely to be the case for Melvin Van Peebles' 80th birthday that will be celebrated tonight at the Film Forum in New York. Though the Afro-American polymath has reached that venerable age, his body of work is not ready yet for retrospective mummification. Now that Obama's "hopeful" prosthetic surgery is peeling off, Van Peebles’s grandiloquently titled masterwork Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song feels as urgent as it did first released in 1971.

“Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury”, this dissonant viual poem – an insurgent confession of a psychedelic soul on ice – epitomises Van Peebles’ protean genius and vision. His determination to autonomously produce, direct, edit, score and star in the first independent black film to rock the foundations of Hollywood remains unmatched. By turning the censors’ scissors into a marketing asset, subverting the dominant depiction of black people on the silver screen while offering black audiences the ransom of respect, Van Peebles made history. Sweetback, which had to be disguised as a pornographic film during production in order to bypass showbiz restrictions, tells the story of a black hustler who, after having killed a cop, flees the urban jungle for the desert. As he escapes, Sweetback enjoys the solidarity of, variously, a priest, Latino drag queens and fellow black brothers and sisters, thus turning his solitary deeds into a kind of collective identification. The film’s different layers coalesce into a vivid whole of lysergic colours, strident sounds and agit-propping jump cuts.

Possibly the first experimental film to acquire blockbuster status without coming to terms with the formal requirements of the box office, Van Peebles’s film gave voice to a previously voiceless black community desperate to see itself on screen for the first time, unleashed. “To create a commercially feasible vehicle, our society being capitalistic and all that, plus to do something that wasn’t Uncle-Tommy,” was Van Peebles’s intention. In doing so, he avoided the besetting sin of militant cinema: elitism.

The New York Times's Vincent Canby wrote the film off as “a slight, pale escape drama about a black man” while authoritative voices from the Black Arts movement dismissed it as stereotypical and exploitative. Huey P Newton, chairman of the Black Panthers, dedicated an entire issue of the party's newspaper to the film hailing it as a revolutionary masterpiece. Newton noted the economic paradox by which the film’s radical agenda defied The Man: “corporate capitalists are so anxious to bleed us for more profits that they either ignore or fail to recognize the many ideas in the film, but because we have supported the movie with our attendance we are able to receive its message”. Predominantly black audiences flocked in, a new "constituency", as the director called his spectators, was born. The film ended up grossing around $10-million having cost $500,000 to make. As this previously untapped market opened up, Hollywood quickly monopolised and neutralised the revolutionary potential of black movie-going: "Blaxploitation" was born. Notable exceptions notwithstanding, the genre, as its name suggests, traded on stereotypes while advancing a sort of Afro-Capitalist-cum-Black-Supremacist-revenge worldview wholly removed from Van Peebles’s idiosyncratic insurrectionary stance.

Leader: The unresolved Eurozone crisis

The eurozone crisis was never resolved. It was merely conveniently forgotten. The vote for Brexit, the terrible war in Syria and Donald Trump’s election as US president all distracted from the single currency’s woes. Yet its contradictions endure, a permanent threat to continental European stability and the future cohesion of the European Union.

The resignation of the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, following defeat in a constitutional referendum on 4 December, was the moment at which some believed that Europe would be overwhelmed. Among the champions of the No campaign were the anti-euro Five Star Movement (which has led in some recent opinion polls) and the separatist Lega Nord. Opponents of the EU, such as Nigel Farage, hailed the result as a rejection of the single currency.

An Italian exit, if not unthinkable, is far from inevitable, however. The No campaign comprised not only Eurosceptics but pro-Europeans such as the former prime minister Mario Monti and members of Mr Renzi’s liberal-centrist Democratic Party. Few voters treated the referendum as a judgement on the monetary union.

To achieve withdrawal from the euro, the populist Five Star Movement would need first to form a government (no easy task under Italy’s complex multiparty system), then amend the constitution to allow a public vote on Italy’s membership of the currency. Opinion polls continue to show a majority opposed to the return of the lira.

But Europe faces far more immediate dangers. Italy’s fragile banking system has been imperilled by the referendum result and the accompanying fall in investor confidence. In the absence of state aid, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, could soon face ruin. Italy’s national debt stands at 132 per cent of GDP, severely limiting its firepower, and its financial sector has amassed $360bn of bad loans. The risk is of a new financial crisis that spreads across the eurozone.

EU leaders’ record to date does not encourage optimism. Seven years after the Greek crisis began, the German government is continuing to advocate the failed path of austerity. On 4 December, Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, declared that Greece must choose between unpopular “structural reforms” (a euphemism for austerity) or withdrawal from the euro. He insisted that debt relief “would not help” the immiserated country.

Yet the argument that austerity is unsustainable is now heard far beyond the Syriza government. The International Monetary Fund is among those that have demanded “unconditional” debt relief. Under the current bailout terms, Greece’s interest payments on its debt (roughly €330bn) will continually rise, consuming 60 per cent of its budget by 2060. The IMF has rightly proposed an extended repayment period and a fixed interest rate of 1.5 per cent. Faced with German intransigence, it is refusing to provide further funding.

Ever since the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, declared in 2012 that he was prepared to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency, EU member states have relied on monetary policy to contain the crisis. This complacent approach could unravel. From the euro’s inception, economists have warned of the dangers of a monetary union that is unmatched by fiscal and political union. The UK, partly for these reasons, wisely rejected membership, but other states have been condemned to stagnation. As Felix Martin writes on page 15, “Italy today is worse off than it was not just in 2007, but in 1997. National output per head has stagnated for 20 years – an astonishing . . . statistic.”

Germany’s refusal to support demand (having benefited from a fixed exchange rate) undermined the principles of European solidarity and shared prosperity. German unemployment has fallen to 4.1 per cent, the lowest level since 1981, but joblessness is at 23.4 per cent in Greece, 19 per cent in Spain and 11.6 per cent in Italy. The youngest have suffered most. Youth unemployment is 46.5 per cent in Greece, 42.6 per cent in Spain and 36.4 per cent in Italy. No social model should tolerate such waste.

“If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has often asserted. Yet it does not follow that Europe will succeed if the euro survives. The continent that once aspired to be a rival superpower to the US is now a byword for decline, and ethnic nationalism and right-wing populism are thriving. In these circumstances, the surprise has been not voters’ intemperance, but their patience.